Podcastle adapts “The Cruelest Team Will Win”

It’s an honor to return to the “pages” of Podcastle — the venerable fantasy podcast site has released an audio adaption of my dark-fantasy-teetering-at-the-edge-of-horror short story “The Cruelest Team Will Win,” just in time for the Halloween season.

Photo by By Ken Thomas

Published last year in Rhonda Parrish’s Corvidae, “Cruelest Team” is the third story I’ve had published in a series that begins with “The Hiker’s Tale” (collected in Unseaming) and continues in Follow the Wounded One (published as a standalone chapbook by Not One of Us); my novel-in-revision Trail of Shadows is also set in this milieu, which imagines that certain people among us have spirit forms, either animal or demonic, and the ability to phase in and out of the spirit world, either avoiding the rest of us or preying on us as temperaments dictate. And though they might be a danger to us, such folks are even more dangerous to each other.

Photo by Davefoc, CC BY-SA 3.0

Especially delicious for me is that “The Cruelest Team Will Win” features a cameo by one of my novel’s primary antagonists. If you give it a listen, I promise you can’t miss her.